Too hilarious! : A capsule review on L’Homme De Hus (The Hus Man) by Camille Boitel (France)

  PHOTO by: OLIVIA LUO 

 L’Homme De Hus at Vancouver Play House

  On the night of February 2nd of 2019 at the Vancouver Playhouse PUSH Festival in downtown, French circus artist Camille Boitel staged a spectacular physical performance piece. Its humorous acts would take you by surprise of wavering emotions with his unpredictable, powerful, poetic, funny and free spirit has you laughing out loud one-minute and pondering the next. Boitel trained at an early age at Ecole de Cirque Annie Fratellini and now staging his first show L’Homme De Hus featuring: Camille Boitel, Silvère Boitel, Vincent Beaume, Guillaume Beguinot. Boitel and others developed works that intersected “circus, magic, and contortion, manifesting the theater of objects and movement” (Ava Kiai of French Culture). He performed using the whole stage ⎼⎼ meaning everything ⎼⎼ by extending these reformable wooden structures everywhere for his main purpose was to face the audience by building a table and a chair. But in his perplexed world, the simple was not simple.

  Boitel coupled comedy with the frustration of the scenario by using this bazaar wooden object he had all been found on the street while creatively coordinating light, sound, and stage assistants all at once. The performance felt theatrical, dramatic, performed but authentic. He got us thinking about the presence of the place, the existing objects but most strikingly was his movements. Interestingly, it allowed us to establish a connection with his persona. “Indeed it is quite funny that this work, based upon the instantaneous, on chance and surprise needed such a long period of preparation” ⎼ Camille Boitel. Ten years ago he and other fellow artists created the project, L’Homme De Hus. “Our source of inspiration is infinite and polymorphous. It is our world and more specifically all the fragile beings within it that inspired us.” Truly, nothing was more natural and unnatural at the same time than this comical, odd, amusing performance.